Aunt Valerie was, until tonight, a possibility. But Angel’s baby needs someone who will make him feel special. Above all, Angel’s baby must believe he was anticipated, longed for, even tried for—she thinks of those pitying women, skinny middle-aged loose-skinned white ladies with their yoga pants and their Chinese babies in their grocery carts. And Angel does want him! When her doctor reminded her that adoption was a possibility, Angel shook her head stoutly. Even in the thick of her fear, she couldn’t imagine giving him up; he was already a part of her.
Angel will never, she vows, remind her child of what she missed because of him. “I would’ve gone to college,” her mother says constantly. “I would’ve moved to New York.” Well, her mother was free of her now. She and Mike are probably home watching some television drama, Mike waxing poetic about how amazing TV writing is nowadays, like he’s the only one to have ever made the observation.
Angel sits in the cold white circle of the halogen lamp, feeling abandoned, and afraid, too, of the vast dark wildness around the house. She should go to bed, but she knows that the baby will keep her awake, and if she’s lying prone and undefended, worry will descend in earnest, will grip her by the throat and drag her under.
She could take one of her grandmother’s sleeping pills or one of her dad’s Percocets. Angel wonders if the baby would drop off into a floating slumber, his lips parted, his little fists unfurling, or if the drug would only affect her, and he would continue to somersault and karate-chop her unresponsive body.
One thirty. She didn’t realize how long a night could be, how capacious and elastic.
Her father is wrong in thinking that Angel feels entitled to be here. She doesn’t feel entitled to be anywhere. What no one appreciates is that it takes courage—and considerable dramatic flair—to show up and insist you belong, to invoke genetic claims and demand food and love and housing. Angel falters, Angel worries, Angel lies awake, hating to be a burden, afraid they’ll send her away, but every morning she gets up and busies herself in the kitchen like it’s hers. She comports herself as though she isn’t some needy disgraced teenager, but a treasured, helpful daughter filling her rightful place. Fake it ’til you make it, Brianna told them.
Earlier, when her father left in his truck—stamped past them as they all stood outside shivering in the driveway—Valerie shook her cell phone and threatened to call the police, to alert them that he was on the road, “plastered out of his mind,” but Yolanda had begged her not to, saying he couldn’t afford a second DWI. Angel hadn’t even known about the first.
“So you want me out there on the road with him?” Valerie shouted, pulling her cardigan tight against the wind. “You want the girls out there? Even if you don’t care about us, how will you feel when he kills some stranger’s family?” But she lowered the phone.
Yolanda blinked helplessly before her daughter’s outrage. Angel stood with Sarah close along her thigh, stroking the little girl’s tangled hair, but Sarah brushed her hand away. “Come inside with me,” Angel said. “I’ll read you a story.”
“No,” Sarah said easily, big eyes on Valerie. Beside her, Lily also looked from her mother to her grandmother with interest, but no surprise. Clearly this fight had occurred in some form before.
Angel thinks that Valerie’s reaction was overblown. Her father didn’t seem that drunk, and kids at school drive buzzed and stoned all the time. It’s how you get between parties. Beer isn’t black tar, it isn’t meth, it isn’t even vodka. And these roads are so long and so empty. But she also feels pricked with injustice because someone should have told her about the DWI. She had a right to know.
“You can’t keep enabling him, Mother. At some point it has to stop. What does he do all day? Does he just sit around drinking all day? Do you ever ask anything of him?”
“He’s trying, hijita. He’s starting up a business fixing windshields. We’ve just been talking about it.”